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On Oct. 31, 2011, The International Herald Tribune started an opinion blog featuring strong views from writers around the world. Over the next two years and two months, each post in this series tried to capture the feel of a place, from a fresh perspective.

MOSCOW — Within two hours of a deadly bombing Sunday at the main railroad station in Volgograd, officials announced that they had identified the female suicide bomber. A name, a photo and a biography spread from news agency to news agency; law enforcement supplied journalists with details, including the tidbit that she had been married to two different Chechen rebel fighters, both now dead.

According to investigators, her severed head was found at the scene, among the remains of the 16 people she had killed. Russians did what anyone would do in this situation: They typed in the name of the killer and studied her social-network accounts. These came alive quickly, with the following announcement on Vkontakte, the most popular Russian social network: “Dear Russians, I don’t understand why you are writing all sorts of weirdness to me. I am alive and well and didn’t commit any acts of terror. Leave me alone.”

That may or may not have been the woman investigators had in mind, but any hope that officials would shed much light on the identity of the suspect was soon dashed, when investigators announced that the terrorist had in fact been a man. Citing an anonymous law-enforcement source, Russian news agencies said the police had mistakenly fingered a woman who happened to be passing by the scene of the blast.

Then the authorities said the attack may have been perpetrated by a man and a woman. There was even a claim that a metal detector had prevented the woman from taking a more active part in the attack and causing more casualties. Metal detectors were installed at the entrances to airports and railroad stations all over Russia after an explosion at a Moscow airport in 2011; most of the ones I have seen at the stations, though, stand idle and unmanned.

Such communications messes follow almost any major event in Russia. At their root is the lying impulse developed over nearly a century. Since the early days of the Soviet Union, reporting good results was more important than actually achieving them. Even as the Soviet economy stagnated and store shelves went from empty to emptier, television broadcast pictures of plentitude and Soviet leaders congratulated their underlings for increasing production and improving the lives of their fellow citizens. Over time, lying well became an end in itself.

MOSCOW — For a long time now many Russians have shared a single dream: to see Mikhail Khodorkovsky free. During the 10 years that the former oil tycoon spent in prison, the image of a liberated Khodorkovsky came to symbolize a number of outcomes: a victory for the opposition, the appearance of a bona fide political alternative to President Vladimir Putin, and perhaps even the end of the Putin era.

None of the other 69 political prisoners carried the same symbolic burden. The news last week of an early release for the members of Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years for staging an anti-Putin protest in a church, and that charges against several participants in the protest movement would be dropped, was welcome, but it was Putin’s pardon of Khodorkovsky that seemed momentous.

“I guess something — or someone — important has changed in the last few days,” wrote Lev Rubinshtein, a poet and a prominent essayist, in his blog the day after Putin said he would grant clemency to Khodorkovsky. “But what changed? Who changed? All these years we have accepted the axiom that ‘Khodorkovsky is going to stay behind bars as long as Putin stays president.’ It was an axiom rather than a hypothesis. So what’s changed?”

MOSCOW — The only thing more creepy than hearing someone suggest the likes of you should be burned alive is hearing someone suggest the likes of you should be burned alive and thinking, “I know that guy.” With various Russian public persons competing for the role of the country’s most virulent homophobe, I have had that experience a few times.

Dmitry Kiselev, the head of the new Russian ministry of truth, suggested last year — when he was a highly placed executive in Russian state broadcasting — that the hearts of gay people should be buried or burned “for they are unsuitable for the aiding of anyone’s life.”

JERUSALEM — President Barack Obama, speaking earlier this month at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, described the two countries’ “different tactical perspectives.” Similarly, Secretary of State John Kerry has said: “While we may sometimes favor a different tactical choice — tactical — the United States and Israel have always shared the same fundamental strategic goal.” And that common goal, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is “making sure that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons.”

BUENOS AIRES — Luck appeared to be on Argentina’s side last Friday, when the draw for next year’s World Cup placed it in “Group F” along with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iran and Nigeria. No major challengers: phew.

MEXICO CITY — For almost one hundred years, all official stationery from the Mexican government bore this motto: “Sufragio efectivo, no reelección” (Effective suffrage, no re-election). That was the rallying cry of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which began in protest, among other things, of the seventh re-election of President Porfirio Díaz.

When the armed struggle ended in 1917 and a new constitution was enacted, re-election was banned for all offices in the executive branch. The prohibition was later extended to all federal and local legislators.

And so Mexicans became one of the few peoples in the Western hemisphere who could not re-elect most officials.

That, however, did not prevent them from re-electing the same party: The Institutional Revolutionary Party has governed for much of the last century.

MOSCOW — The envious Ukraine-watch of many Russians culminated Sunday when a statue of Lenin was toppled in Kiev. It evoked the memory of one of the most richly symbolic, joyous and ultimately disappointing moments in Russia’s own history, when, after a hard-line coup failed in August 1991, a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, in front of the K.G.B. headquarters in Moscow was toppled. A new era was beginning.

That didn’t turn out like it seemed it would. The brown-granite Felix was taken to the vast backyard of a new boxlike museum and dumped unceremoniously on the grass, along with a dozen or so other newly toppled statues, including those of the deceased Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, and revolutionaries such as the education commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky and the Bolshevik leader Mikhail Kalinin. Dzerzhinsky’s pedestal stayed behind; it was nearly as tall as the monument itself. It looked bereft, exposed out there on the square, especially after someone placed a wooden cross on it.Read more…

But it is also a group with a unique problem: It is a historically nomadic society and its relationship to land clashes with the state’s notion of ownership and its need for planned development. These difficulties are exacerbated by longstanding tensions between Jews and Arabs.

One-third to one-half of the 170,000 or so Bedouins of the Negev live in unrecognized villages in the northern part of the desert. They claim the land as their own, based on a long history as its residents. They have no legal documents proving ownership, and the country has been reluctant to formalize their claims.Read more…

Supporters of E.U. integration tried to break through police lines during a rally in Kiev on Sunday.Credit Gleb Garanich/Reuters

MOSCOW — In Russian, envy comes in two colors: black and white. The former is mean and resentful: “It should be me, not you.” The latter is aspirational: “I want to be you.” “Black envy” affirms a despondent world view; “white envy” affords a hopeful one.

For a week and a half, many Russians have had a clear case of white envy watching the protests in neighboring Ukraine. After President Viktor F. Yanukovich backed out of signing a political and trade agreement with the European Union, protests broke out in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.

Many competing and contradictory political forces are involved, but the way it looks from Moscow the front line is drawn clearly: Ukraine has to choose between an increasingly reactionary Russia and Western Europe. Russia is using every kind of pressure — from threatening economic sanctions to declaring tens of thousands of Ukrainians persona non grata — all in order to drag Ukraine back into the Middle Ages with it. Western Europe, which has many demands of its own, promises a future of openness and progress.Read more…

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Latitude offers incisive commentary on issues of local and international concern – dispatches on the most significant and intriguing issues, interpreted for a global audience. Read more »